Mr. de Blasio’s Moon Shot

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

May 5, 2014

Mayor Bill de Blasio’s housing plan is so big that it took not one but two media events, in Brooklyn and the Bronx, to unveil it on Monday, in which the mayor and local pols exulted over the plan’s breadth and ambition. Yet if Mr. de Blasio really is going to keep his campaign promise and end New York’s crisis of inequality and housing unaffordability, he is going to have to go big.

And this plan is what big looks like.

It’s a $41 billion effort to build or preserve 200,000 affordable units in all five boroughs, over 10 years, for the benefit of half a million New Yorkers — 120,000 apartments preserved and 80,000 newly built — using everything from energy retrofitting (to keep landlord’s costs and rents down) to new housing and building codes to a thorough cataloging of neighborhoods and underused spaces where development opportunities await.

Its most striking feature is its eager embrace of adding height and density to neighborhoods beyond Manhattan, through mandatory inclusionary zoning, the stick-plus-carrot that requires builders in newly rezoned areas to set aside a percentage of units as forever affordable. New York has a voluntary plan that has produced about 4,500 affordable units in the last 25 years, which is pretty good but not the scale Mr. de Blasio wants. The plan also emphasizes losing no more ground on existing affordable units. It seeks to identify neighborhoods vulnerable to gentrification, to “lock in” affordable rents before it’s too late and to prod landlords to keep rents down.

The questions the 116-page plan raises would fill another book. What would the city look and feel like if builders built extrahigh and extradense? What strains would this place on schools and subways? (Those dreaded words, decaying infrastructure, are a real impediment to major rebuilding.) What if builders reacted to mandatory inclusionary zoning by not building at all?

What would public-housing campuses be like if their open spaces were filled in? The city’s Housing Authority has a lot of “underused” land, but any development must preserve quality spaces and tenants’ dignity. And, at a time when the federal housing commitment is withered, New York needs all the outside help it can get. That means more support from Albany, through tax-subsidy programs and capital dollars, which is always a challenge.

Much of the plan’s appeal lies in its commitment to helping people at the lowest incomes, and its understanding that part of the solution lies in tackling homelessness, fostering economic development (making homes affordable by raising people’s wages) and engaging the community. Mr. de Blasio knows that housing is not pre-K; it’s an issue that divides neighbors from developers and from one another. One New Yorker’s dream neighborhood is another’s gentrified nightmare.

Mr. de Blasio’s administration has not learned — or simply rejects — the political value of underpromising. From the pledge of billions of undefined health care savings in its newly struck deal with the teachers’ union, to its plan to reduce traffic deaths (in a city of eight million) to zero, it has spun the dial on expectations well past 11.

But there is no arguing that the city faces a crisis of affordability. Rents have gone up nearly 40 percent in the last 20 years, while renters’ wages have risen less than 15 percent. Mr. de Blasio, should he win a second term, has embarked on a mission to last his entire mayoralty, and then some. The all-important details have yet to be filled in, but the mayor has locked himself in with a hard and fast number: 200,000 or bust.